Illin’ in Illinois: Romney Finally Finds his Voice

Evidently, one of the entrance requirements to the field of political consulting is that you have a self-serving cliché ready made for any eventuality. If your man (or woman)—be it Michael Dukakis in 1988, Barack Obama in 2008, or Mitt Romney this year—goes through a long and nasty nomination battle, the patter you trot out is that being pounded like a fence post for month after month made him (or her) a much stronger candidate. When Romney finally secures the job of taking on Obama in November—and after his easy victory in Illinois last night, it is looking like “when” rather than “if”—I’d lay a hundred to one odds that Eric Fehrnstrom, Tim Pawlenty, and the rest of his mouthpieces will be all over the airwaves peddling this reassuring argument.

Heck, the Mittster will probably make it himself. I can see it now: a sit-down with Brian Williams, Steve Kroft, or someone of that ilk. “Look, Brian: I’m a businessman, not a politician. Frankly, it took me a while to get accustomed to being the front runner in a national race. And I made some mistakes. But now that I’ve accumulated enough delegates for the nomination I’d like to thank former Senator Santorum and former Speaker Gingrich for forcing me to raise my game. I took some lumps, and it wasn’t much fun at the time, but it has left me much better prepared to go head-to-head against President Obama and his billion-dollar campaign chest.”

It will be mostly hogwash, of course. What nearly four months of trench warfare has really left Romney with is frighteningly high negative ratings from the independent voters he will need to win the White House; a depleted campaign bank account (doubtless he can refill it); and a number of hostages to fortune that the Obama campaign will be eagerly waiting to exploit—from his record at Bain Capital to his recent promise to defund Planned Parenthood. But last night, perhaps for the first time, the argument that Romney will be a better candidate for what he’s been through didn’t sound completely outlandish—not for the fifteen minutes, or so, while he was speaking, anyway.

Introduced on the eve of his forty-third wedding anniversary by his wife Ann, who is emerging as his not-so-secret weapon in the campaign to win over women voters—and Americans of both sexes who still harbor suspicions that her husband may actually be a robot built and programmed by some Silicon Valley whizz kids in the employ of Karl Rove—Romney gave what was probably his best speech of the campaign. He started off woodenly, as he always does, and he stepped on a couple of his lines, including a zinger about Obama’s recent references to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. But his focus on drawing a contrast with Obama was relentless, and, for once, he sounded as if he genuinely believed what he was saying—or, at least, that he genuinely believed he could leave such an impression.

Here, for the first time since the televised debates last fall, was the Romney that Rove, Fred Malek, Ed Gillespie, and other G.O.P. panjandrums have been pinning their hopes on. Yes, he was talking from a teleprompter—Rick Santorum needled him about that later on, from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—but that hasn’t aided him much in the past. On this occasion, it appeared to help him pace himself, as he sought to criticize Obama’s record on the economy and contrast it with his own. “For twenty-five years, I lived and breathed jobs, business, and the economy,” he said. “I had successes and failures but each step of the way, I learned a little more about what it is that makes our American system so powerful. You can’t learn that teaching Constitutional law. You can’t learn that as a community organizer.”

The speech didn’t exhibit much purchase on reality—Romney depicted himself as a job-creating wizard rather than the financial engineer he actually was—nor did it contain much in the way of actual proposals. But truth and substance weren’t the metrics the Mittster was measuring himself against last night. His task was to sound some overall campaign themes for the fall, and to give the G.O.P. faithful hope that he might actually be able to mix it up with Obama. Judged in those terms, he succeeded.

Romney pilloried Obama’s policies pretty much across the board; that was to be expected. But he also tied his critique to traditional G.O.P. rallying cries of optimism and liberty. “The simple truth is that this President just doesn’t understand the genius of America’s economy—or the secret of our success,” he said. “The American economy is fueled by freedom…. But, over the last three years, this Administration has been engaged in an assault on our freedom.” Romney blamed the tepid recovery on the President’s job-killing bureaucrats and regulations. (“His regulators would have shut down the Wright Brothers for dust pollution.”) He blamed high gas prices on the President’s environmental policies. (“Once we built the interstate highway system and the Hoover Dam. Now we can’t even build a pipeline.”) And he uttered some commendably short and declaratory sentences, such as this one: “I’m running for President because I have the experience and the vision to get us out of this mess.”

A speech is just a speech, of course. Come Saturday, Romney will be back in the mire, this time in Louisiana. But as I said in a post a couple of days ago, the importance of a big win for him in Illinois shouldn’t be underestimated. Just a couple of weeks ago, it seemed perfectly possible that Santorum would storm out of the South and mount a serious challenge. Largely due to the enormous imbalance in financial resources between him and Romney, this didn’t happen. According to the exit polls, about the only voting groups Santorum led in were the poor (people who didn’t attend college and earn under thirty-thousand dollars a year), the very conservative, and the very religious. If yesterday’s result didn’t quite seal the nomination for Romney—and it didn’t—it surely proved, once and for all, that Santorum can’t win it.

All in all, then, the best night Romney has had in ages, capped by the Chi-Town dog that didn’t bark. For months now, David Axelrod, President Obama’s campaign aide, has kept up a running commentary on the Mittster’s missteps via Twitter. Last night, nothing. Finally, just before midnight, the Axe posted this tweet: “Mitt’s SuperPac enjoys pounding Santo so much they just ran a negative ad on CBS in Chicago-more than 3 hours after the polls closed!”

There’s an old truism in American politics. When your opponent is complaining about how much money you have spent, you know you are getting to them.

Photograph by Scott Olson/Getty Images.

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